Daoism, Ecology, and World Reduction in Le Guin’s Utopian Fictions
GIB PRETTYMAN
For scholars who approach Ursula K. Le Guin’s fictions from the perspective of Marxist critical theory, ecology and Daoism can be problematic aspects of her work. In the effusion of Le Guin scholarship that coincided with the establishment of the journal Science Fiction Studies (SFS) in the early 1970s, critics were quick to identify characteristic subjects of “wholeness and balance” and to link them to her ecological concerns and the Daoist dynamic of yin and yang.1 On the one hand, critical theorists saw in these subjects an inspiring awareness of systemic relationships, evocation of “non-capitalist habitats,” and rejection of capitalist alienation, particularly given the publication of her overtly anarchist utopian novel The Dispossessed in 1974.2 On the other hand, they found her “mythopoetic” invocations of balance to be wishful thinking and to imply that radical political action was misguided.3 Sorting out this ambivalence was especially relevant to critical theorists in terms of assessing Le Guin’s utopianism, which they regarded as a positive historical development and a key aspect of SF as a contemporary cultural genre.
Starting with the hugely influential work of Darko Suvin and Fredric Jameson, then, critical theorists have worked to highlight the radical energies of Le Guin’s fictions while simultaneously downplaying politically troublesome aspects of her invocations of Daoism4 and ecology. Although experimentation with non-Western spiritual traditions was a hallmark of the postwar counterculture, Daoism was (and remains) a poorly understood tradition for most critics. Both Suvin and Jameson viewed Daoism with distrust and dismissed it as politically misleading. Ecology, by comparison, represented a major cultural and historical issue in the early 1970s. As Peter Stillman notes, Le Guin was writing at the outset of the modern environmentalist movement, symbolized by the first Earth Day in 1970.5 The field known as “deep ecology” was also coalescing at this time. Rather than treating this issue directly, however, Suvin and Jameson interpreted Le Guin’s ecological themes as fantasies that revealed the inescapable political contradictions of capitalism. In particular, Jameson described Le Guin’s approach as “world reduction,” which he saw as a fantasy of escaping from the history of capitalism. Reduced thus to the status of compensatory fantasies, neither Daoism nor ecology was engaged as a strategic framework in its own right. Indeed, serious doubts were suggested about Le Guin’s use of both.
In the essay that follows, I revisit this under-explored ground between the concerns of critical theory and Le Guin’s intellectual uses of ecology and Daoism. I argue that Le Guin’s fictional explorations of ecological relationships do perform real political work on a cognitive and epistemological level by emphasizing a range of challenges to conventional egoistic perceptions. From this perspective, what Jameson identifies as world reduction can be seen to serve a cognitive and material purpose by focusing on the primary epistemological implication of ecology: namely, the historical necessity to reframe familiar assumptions of egoism and anthropocentrism.
I am not using “ego” here in its psychoanalytical meaning, but using it rather to indicate one’s sense of being a separate, enduring, and self-centered actor in the world. This is the sense employed by eco-socialist Joel Kovel when he asserts in The Enemy of Nature that consumer capitalism is “the way of the Ego.”6 Ego, Kovel argues, is “the anti-ecocentric moment enshrined by Capital” and “the secret to the riddle of growth and the mania of consumption.” From this perspective, global consumer capitalism constitutes the cultural, technological, institutional, and psychosocial apotheosis of egoism, turning natural self-interest into an imperative pseudo-subjectivity enforced by “the titanic power of the capitalist state and cultural apparatus.”7 It is the “enshrinement” of egocentrism that makes capitalism “the enemy of nature,” Kovel argues. In a very real sense, the artificial environments that we have constructed around ourselves—everything from houses and cities to markets and media and virtual realities—are material manifestations of all-consuming egoism. Therefore, one can critique the ecological pathologies of global capitalism as “expressions of an impeded motion between inner and outer world.”8 Such an approach is at once psychological, philosophical, and material.
In describing capitalism as “the way of the Ego,” Kovel formulates in socialist terms what critical traditions like Buddhism and Daoism have long asserted: that egoistic perceptions and institutions are inherently mistaken. Seen from sufficient distance, the egoistic “self” is clearly an unreliable category and even a kind of fiction, as everything about self-“identity” is in constant flux and ultimately proves to be transitory. Buddhist psychology points out that to act as though one were a fixed and enduring entity leads to certain characteristic problems such as egoistic “attachment”—trying to grasp and possesses things that are in fact always changing—which it asserts is a primary cause of human suffering. Similarly, Daoist philosophy emphasizes the enduring context of Dao (Tao)—the fundamental nature of things and processes of the world—over egoistic illusions and scholastic definitions. In addition to the illusion of fixed identity, another egoistic illusion is the sense of being distinct and separate from the rest of the world. Buddhism and Daoism therefore also explore methods for recognizing fundamental interconnections beneath the appearance of separate “forms.”
Although these concerns of Eastern philosophy are often considered “mystical,” their similarities to the fundamental insights of ecology are evident: both frameworks emphasize systemic processes and aim to critique egoistic illusions. And as Kovel’s combination of ecology and socialism suggests, these concerns are arguably compatible with Marxist critique as well. Theoretically, all these frameworks could contribute toward cognitive reframing that would undermine capitalism and the way of the ego. As Kovel puts it, “Recognition of ourselves in nature and nature in ourselves” and “subjective as well as objective participation in ecosystems” are “the essential condition[s] for overcoming the domination of nature, and its pathologies of instrumental production and addictive consumption.”9
Le Guin’s fictions, I argue, work toward this “recognition of ourselves in nature” by using insights derived from Daoism and ecology to challenge familiar contexts of ego. Daoism and ecology are thus at the heart of her political vision, both as cognitive strategies and material limits. In order to explore these assertions, I first briefly detail how Suvin and Jameson approach Le Guin’s Daoist ecology and consider the implications of the world reduction that Jameson sees in her work. Then I describe how Le Guin’s utopian strategy, informed by Daoism, uses specific forms of world reduction to challenge egoistic assumptions. Finally, I consider the implications of Le Guin’s strategy relative to that of critical theory and demonstrate how material limits to egoism represent a problem for critical theory as such.
ECOLOGY AS SYMPTOM
As befitting his influence on the field of SF in general, Darko Suvin helped to set the tone for reading Le Guin from the perspective of critical theory.10 He greatly admired Le Guin’s work, and famously consulted with Le Guin on the vision of The Dispossessed—though to what extent is unclear.11 Suvin also edited the special issue of Science Fiction Studies (November 1975) devoted to Le Guin’s work.12 In his own contribution to that special issue, “Parables of De-alienation: Le Guin’s Widdershins Dance,” Suvin presented his basic solution to Le Guin’s problematic valorization of Daoism and ecology by distinguishing between representations of “static balance” and “dynamic balance.” Le Guin, he argued, maintained an active and dynamic vision, a “widdershins dance” of critical perceptions of the world, that was equivalent in many respects to the insights of Marxist critique.13 This dynamic vision represented “the quest for and sketching of a new, collectivist system of no longer alienated human relationships, which arise out of the absolute necessity for overcoming an intolerable ethical, cosmic, political and physical alienation.”14 Suvin argued that Le Guin’s work had matured from the comparatively simplistic and ahistorical “mythopoetics” of her “apprentice trilogy”—Rocannon’s World (1966), Planet of Exile (1966), and City of Illusions (1967)—to the more complexly historical engagements in The Dispossessed.15 He saw her utopianism as evidence that “the forces of de-alienation are on the rise in Le Guin’s writing, parallel to what she (one hopes rightly) senses as the deep historical currents in the world.”16 He interpreted her newest utopian fiction at that point, “The New Atlantis” (1975), as further evidence of “the realistic, bitter-sweet Le Guinian ambiguity” and of the “clear and firm but richly and truthfully ambiguous Leftism” which “situates her at the node of possibly the central contemporary contradiction, that between capitalist alienation and the emerging classless de-alienation.”17
In emphasizing Le Guin’s work as an “SF of collective practice,”18 Suvin strongly downplayed her Daoism. Rather than “a static balancing of two yin-and-yang-type alternatives, two principles or opposites (light-darkness, male-female, etc.) between which a middle Way of wisdom leads,” Suvin argued, Le Guin’s “ambiguities” are “in principle dynamic, and have through her evolution become more clearly and indubitably such.” He saw Daoism as merely a superseded early interest, arguing that her thought had “evolved” through the Daoism of Laozi (Lao Tzu) to the anarchism of Kropotkin and Goodman, and claimed that “attempts to subsume her under Taoism” would be “not only doomed to failure but also retrospectively revealed as inadequate even for her earlier works.”19 He regarded Daoism as too simplistic and too mythical to be of use in accurately understanding the political implications of Le Guin’s representations of “permanent revolution and evolution.”20
Suvin did not similarly dismiss Le Guin’s ecology, but he downplayed it as well. Despite noting capitalism’s “intolerable ethical, cosmic, political and physical alienation,” Suvin did not consider her ecological approach to cosmic and physical alienation at face value. Instead, he treated her ecological ideals primarily as metaphors of renewed collective relationships. His reading of “The New Atlantis,” for example, paid no attention to Le Guin’s early depiction of catastrophically raised sea levels resulting from the greenhouse effect. Likewise, his reading of The Word for World Is Forest emphasized psychical rather than physical alienation. For Suvin, “the forest which is the word for the world in the language of Selver’s people” represents (like Daoism) “a static balance, a closed circle of unhistorical time.”21 Instead of considering Le Guin’s concerns for material ecosystems, then, Suvin reads the novel in relation to “the all-pervading psychical eco-system of modern capitalism.” Suvin treats Le Guin’s ecological concerns as just another item in the list of grievances against capitalism and its social order, or as an analogy for properly political alienation, rather than an urgent historical framework in its own right.
Fredric Jameson shares Suvin’s commitment to critiquing the fundamental political implications of texts using the frameworks of psychoanalysis and critical theory. Jameson insists that a text’s subject matter and intended themes are not especially significant in their own right, but rather constitute evidence of the author’s imaginative attempts to address contradictions in historical social structures. Suvin captures this idea succinctly in a later essay with an epigraph from Roland Barthes: “What is the meaning of a book? Not what it argues, but what it argues with.”22 Like Suvin, then, Jameson reads texts symptomatically, such that their overt content or details are analyzed for what they reveal of psychic processes—deep fears or hopes from our collective “political unconscious”—and in turn those psychic processes indicate distortions and contradictions of the existing political order. In a way, this involves reading texts negatively: watching for the symptomatic places where they necessarily fail, as opposed to treating their intended themes and chosen subjects as positive content in its own right. At the same time, however, symptomatic failures can reveal the enduring hopes of people in the face of political alienation. Jameson labels this enduring hope “the desire called Utopia.”23
While Jameson addresses Le Guin’s ecological ideals more explicitly than Suvin did, then, he similarly treats them primarily as symptomatic evidence of more familiar political issues. In his essay “World Reduction in Le Guin,” which also appeared in the Le Guin issue of SFS, Jameson considered the political ambiguities that her Daoist-inspired focus on ecology represents from a Marxist perspective.24 One of the major psychic processes that he identified in Le Guin’s work was “world reduction.” Pointing primarily to The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Dispossessed, Jameson described Le Guin’s world reduction as “a principle of systematic exclusion, a kind of surgical excision of empirical reality, something like a process of ontological attenuation in which the sheer teeming multiplicity of what exists, or what we call reality, is deliberately thinned and weeded out through an operation of radical abstractions and simplification.”25 The extremely cold and barren planet Gethen in Left Hand of Darkness, for example, represents “an experimental landscape in which our being-in-the-world is simplified to the extreme.”26 The moonscape of Annares in The Dispossessed is a similarly barren “experimental landscape,” particularly given that it serves as the setting for imagining a utopian society.
Jameson saw mixed implications in Le Guin’s world reduction. On the positive side, such simplification of our being-in-the-world tries to imagine away capitalism, and is therefore evidence of utopian desire. But clearly any resulting critique or alternative vision would be questionable to the extent that it is based on fantasized world reduction. From this perspective, as Jameson’s term suggests, world reduction is largely a wished-for escape from the frustrating complexity of lived existence in the modern world. Jameson saw this wish in part as “a symbolic affirmation of the autonomy of the organism,” but also as “a fantasy realization of some virtually total disengagement of the body from its environment or eco-system.” It yields a situation, he argued, “in which our sensory links with the multiple and shifting perceptual fields around us are abstracted so radically as to vouchsafe, perhaps, some new glimpse as to the ultimate nature of human reality.”27 In other words, world reduction suggests both regrettably escapist and laudably utopian impulses. Although he referred to Le Guin’s world reduction as an “experimental ecology,” however, Jameson didn’t explore its significance in terms of ecology per se.
The ambivalent significance of world reduction again indicates the problems that Le Guin’s invocation of ecology and Daoism pose from the perspective of critical theory. To point toward ecological ideals or seek a glimpse of “the ultimate nature of reality” is a laudable reaction to political alienation, but it also seems escapist when considered in relation to the “all-pervading psychical eco-system” of global capitalism. From the perspective of critical theory, ecological ideals of balance or wholeness seem to be outside of history. This perception is only amplified when the source of the ecological ideals is an ancient and mystical system such as Daoism, which Jameson takes to be a key source of Le Guin’s “anti-political, anti-activist stance.”28 Like Suvin, then, Jameson seeks to separate positive ideals and political longings from the particular frameworks of ecology and Daoism that Le Guin uses to formulate them.
At least in the case of ecology, this unwillingness to consider Le Guin’s frameworks seems to be a significant shortcoming, given that ecological crises are an important historical context in their own right. And in terms of Daoism, Suvin’s assessment also appears to be wrong in at least one respect: Le Guin in fact turned toward Daoism with even more vigor and subtlety in her later work, including her explicit utopian theorizing and her most experimental utopian work. Given these facts, there would seem to be room for critical theorists to engage more with Le Guin’s ecological and Daoist frameworks in their own right.
By the same token, Jameson’s insights reveal an important problem for critics who take Le Guin’s ecology and Daoism seriously, because world reduction is clearly a perplexing technique for someone who supposedly values ecological insights. Ecology as a positive framework emphasizes qualities such as diversity, complexity, and systemic balance, whereas world reduction seems to ignore those factors, or actively to fantasize them away. Critics who admire Le Guin’s ecological ideals, no less than critical theorists who distrust them, need to consider the relationships between her world reduction and her uses of Daoism and ecology.
YIN UTOPIANISM
Suvin and Jameson are certainly correct about capitalism as an all-pervading psychic ecosystem, and world reduction has remained characteristic in Le Guin’s work, including her later utopian novels Always Coming Home (1985) and The Telling (2000). Thus the basics of their reading are not at issue: Le Guin does attempt to imagine capitalism away, and both the desire to escape and the severely limited ability to do so are symptomatic of our historical period. However, I maintain that Le Guin’s Daoist ecology does more than simply confirm the basic diagnosis and the critical framework that interprets the symptoms. Insisting on an ecological perspective yields politically effective cognitive estrangement of the sort that Suvin posits for SF. Specifically, ecology involves two related cognitive processes: unlearning the egoistic and anthropocentric illusions that underlie the psychic ecosystem of capitalism, and learning the real limits that characterize the material ecosystem and circumscribe human culture. Seen this way, Le Guin’s world reduction is not just an effort to fantasize capitalism away, but a strategic response to the worldview of capitalism—and Daoism provides an essential framework for conceptualizing that strategy.
This is basically the artistic and political strategy that Le Guin outlined in her 1982 lecture “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be,” where she used the Daoist framework of yin and yang to contrast her utopianism with that of the Western tradition. “Yin” roughly signifies the dark, soft, passive, metaphorically “feminine” aspects of the universe, while “yang” is its bright, hard, aggressive, metaphorically “masculine” aspects. From Le Guin’s perspective, “Utopia has been yang. In one way or the other, from Plato on, utopia has been the big yang motorcycle trip. Bright, dry, clear, strong, firm, active, aggressive, lineal, progressive, creative, expanding, advancing, and hot.”29 By contrast, Le Guin claimed that she was “trying to suggest, in an evasive, distrustful, untrustworthy fashion, and as obscurely as I can,” that “our final loss of faith” in the “radiant sandcastle” that was the European and masculine utopian tradition might “enable our eyes to adjust to a dimmer light and in it perceive another kind of utopia”—a “yin utopia.”30
Although she used the framework of yin and yang, it is important to notice that she saw her yin utopianism as a strategic counterweight rather than a mystical celebration of inevitable balance. In a response to the SFS special issue on her work, Le Guin noted that “all too often … I find the critic apparently persuaded that Yin and Yang are opposites, between which lies the straight, but safe, Way”—a conception of Daoism that she insists “is all wrong.”31 Her explicit theorizing in “Non-Euclidean” demonstrates instead how Daoism can be used to diagnose and combat imbalance. “Our civilization is now so intensely yang,” Le Guin declares, “that any imagination of bettering its injustices or eluding its self-destructiveness must involve a reversal.” Le Guin glosses her envisioned “reversal” by citing a passage from Laozi’s Daodejing (Tao Te Ching):
The ten thousand things arise together
and I watch their return.
They return each to its root.
Returning to one’s roots is known as stillness.
Returning to one’s destiny is known as the constant.
Knowledge of the constant is known as discernment.
To ignore the constant
is to go wrong, and end in disorder.32
Le Guin didn’t cite any translator for this rendering of the passage; presumably it is her own, derived from comparison of prominent translations.33 Fifteen years later, in her own published translation of Laozi, Le Guin titled this passage “Returning to the Root” and rendered it in more natural and ecological language:
The ten thousand things arise together;
in their arising is their return.
Now they flower,
and flowering
sink homeward,
returning to the root.
The return to the root
is peace.
Peace: to accept what must be,
to know what endures.
In that knowledge is wisdom.
Without it, ruin, disorder.34
Here the confident subjectivity and intellectual abstractions of the earlier translation (“destiny,” “discernment,” “the constant”) are almost completely replaced by analogies to impersonal natural processes, a hallmark of Daoist thought. The result is a series of fundamental ecological insights: recognizing the enduring relationships between all things, recognizing their endless impermanence, recognizing their fundamental properties, and recognizing the “wisdom” of this “knowledge” as opposed to anthropocentric and egoistic constructions of order. Using these insights, Le Guin’s yin utopianism seeks to challenge ego-logical frameworks by appealing to ecological ones.
As it was for Daoists in the Warring States period of Chinese history, it is the “ruin” and “disorder” of existing social institutions that leads Le Guin to her strategy of envisioned simplification and “return.” She argues for the need to compensate in the opposite direction from our “intensely yang” culture, and to undo the confident egoism that moves us farther and farther from “what endures.” Paradoxically, then, Le Guin’s yin utopia imagines not a “no place,” but precisely a radical version of the here and now: “If utopia is a place that does not exist, then surely (as Lao Tzu would say) the way to get there is by the way that is not a way. And in that same vein, the nature of the utopia I am trying to describe is such that if it is to come, it must exist already.”35 In suggesting this paradoxical utopian strategy, Le Guin asserts that her intent “is not reactionary, nor even conservative, but simply subversive. It seems that the utopian imagination is trapped, like capitalism and industrialism and the human population, in a one-way future consisting only of growth. All I’m trying to do is figure out how to put a pig on the tracks.”36 Le Guin lumps capitalism, progressivism, utopianism, and Marxism together as manifestations of the prevailing egoistic orientation toward endless growth. Instead, she wants to emphasize a radical knowledge of place, of here and now. Both ecology and Daoism represent critical frameworks for this approach.
Such cognitive world reduction, or “return to the root,” has become an increasingly significant aspect of our historical moment since 1975. No doubt, as Jameson suggests, it primarily reveals a desire to imagine away capitalism. However, it also represents the recognition of real limits and the real reductions that must eventually occur, one way or the other. In Ecology as Politics, published at the same time as the Le Guin issue of SFS, André Gorz notes that capitalism—specifically, what we would now call industrial capitalism—was confronting numerous concrete ecological limits. In the 1970s, oil shortages and pollution were the most evident examples of ecological limits. Kovel, writing at the turn of the twenty-first century, could point to a laundry list of devastating ecological statistics, including the encompassing crisis of global climate change. Now we can add physiological phenomena like the diabetes and obesity epidemics, which are essentially physiological limits on growth and consumption—points at which industrial “satisfaction” of appetites destroys the organism itself. Even the fictions and abstractions of postindustrial capitalism are reaching real limits, such as financial institutions that are “too big to fail” or digital “addictions” that unfit us for survival in the real world. In all these ways, assumptions of endless growth and ever-increasing consumption are, as Gorz said, encountering physical contradictions or “counterproductivities.”37 These are ecological limits of ego-logic, experienced from squarely within consumer culture (to say nothing of globalization’s relentless effects on nonindustrialized peoples and cultures). To practice “ecological realism,” Gorz insists, the point “is not to refrain from consuming more and more, but to consume less and less—there is no other way of conserving the available reserves for future generations.”38 Cognitively, “to understand and overcome such ‘counterproductivities,’ one has to break with economic rationality.”39 Le Guin, then, is expressing a basic ecological strategy of our times: trying to counteract the way of the ego.40
Le Guin’s Daoism functions as a critical framework for this cognitive reframing away from ego-logic and toward eco-logic in ways that go well beyond the familiar distinction of yin and yang and the ideal “way” of Dao. The Daoism of Laozi and Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu) is a philosophical worldview—not a set of canonical beliefs or scriptural revelations like the typical Western understanding of religions. Therefore, Daoism contributes to Le Guin’s work not as beliefs to be affirmed, but as strategies to be pursued. Daoism’s most important ecological strategies are challenging conventional knowledge and recognizing the intrinsic characteristics of things, both of which serve to reframe the way of the ego.
Daoism as a critical framework is fiercely critical of conventional knowledge, scholasticism, and intellectual “truths” that derive from confident imposition of anthropocentric values. Laozi’s “wise soul”41 is marked by humility, not as an ethical duty, but out of respect for the complexity of natural processes and in opposition to the dominant society, whose confident imposition of conventional “knowledge” creates injustices and imbalances. Like Gorz’s ecology, Laozi explains the epistemological limits of “rationality” in terms of evident physical limits: “Brim-fill the bowl, / it’ll spill over. / Keep sharpening the blade, / you’ll soon blunt it.”42 In explaining her yin utopianism, Le Guin quotes Zhuangzi’s insistence that “the best understanding … ‘rests in what it cannot understand. If you do not understand this, then Heaven the Equalizer will destroy you.’”43 To a large extent, ecological reframing means unlearning conventional perceptions that seem so fixed from the perspective of the way of the ego.
The Daoist framework of natural processes and fundamental qualities also reveals the enduring strength of what is apparently weak and how it can function as a corrective to existing social and political power. Le Guin has this aspect of Daoism in mind when she describes a yin utopia as “dark, wet, obscure, weak, yielding, passive, participatory, circular, cyclical, peaceful, nurturant, retreating, contracting, and cold.”44 Daoism teaches that what appear to be “weak” characteristics such as yielding can actually be powerful strategies, just as soft water wears away hard rock, or a useless tree survives the carpenter’s ax, or the low valley is fertile. Again, this valorization of the “weak” is not simply an ethical or moral principle, but (like critical theory) an observation that claims to result from the fundamental qualities and relationships of things.
Indeed, in studying intrinsic characteristics, Daoism constitutes a theory of power. The book attributed to Laozi is known as the Daodejing, meaning the classic work (jing; Wade-Giles: ching) about dao and de (te). Critics who are unfamiliar with Daoism tend to focus on Dao as the encompassing mystical ideal and on yin and yang as primary categories. However, Le Guin understands the importance of de, meaning the fundamental properties and powers of a thing, its “virtues” in the old sense of “characteristic qualities,” as when we talk about the virtues of (say) a particular herb or type of wood. Unfortunately, de is often translated simply as “virtue” and thus garbled by the modern moralistic implications of that word.45 Le Guin’s published version of the Daodejing translates the title as “A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way,” so she effectively renders de as “power” of a specific kind. Le Guin’s decision to translate it as “power” shows how she turns to Daoism as a strategy, not (as Jameson asserts) simply as abstract ethics. Another key aspect of Daoist challenges to the ego, then, is recognizing de and understanding “what must be” and “what endures,” especially as counterweights to less enduring social and political forms of power.
Le Guin’s fictions—and particularly her utopian fictions—employ these Daoist ecological frameworks in a variety of ways, all of which challenge the root issue of egoistic assumptions. Sometimes the Daoist frameworks go unnoticed because they mirror familiar SF techniques, such as when she uses satire to highlight egoism. Suvin notes the satire of self-deluded consumer hyperbole in “The New Atlantis,” for example, where an authoritarian and commercial culture that is literally sinking under the weight of its environmental devastation consoles itself with preposterous advertising. The portrayal of Captain Davidson in The Word for World Is Forest is also a dark satire of monstrous male egoism, especially when compared to the mystical invocation of Selver and the dreamtime of the forest culture. A similar satire is evident in the portrayal of Dr. Haber in The Lathe of Heaven, with George Orr’s oppositional humility rendered in explicitly Daoist terms. The Dispossessed satirizes the confident knowledge of Urrasti scientists through their equally confident pronouncements of “logical” sexism. Always Coming Home satirizes both the extinct “backwards-head” inhabitants of California and the monological culture of the Condor as counterpoints to the ecological ways of the Kesh. In The Telling, the governments of Earth and Aka are satires of fundamentalism and industrialism, respectively, and again serve to emphasize the reasonable “unreason” of the old ways. In all of these cases, satirical portrayals of egoism are contrasted with more humble cultural beliefs as a means of challenging the centrality of “logical” power.
While such satires are insightful, however, their heavy-handedness is likely to lead to defensive push-back and thus to fall short of the radical cognitive reframing envisioned by ecology and Daoism. One thinks, for example, of Thomas Disch’s indignant reaction to the feminist SF of Le Guin and others; Always Coming Home, Disch argued, “requires nothing less … than the abolition of Western civilization as we know it.”46 Similarly, the grossly pathological egoism of Captain Davidson or the ridiculous sexism of the Urrasti scientists could easily make a reader feel that she was not egoistic by comparison. Satire externalizes egoism in the form of an identifiable opposition, making it easy to dismiss as something that other people should stop doing. As Suvin observed, “unfortunately alienation within the all-pervading psychical eco-system of modern capitalism is not always so conveniently embodied in a malevolent Other.”47
Another familiar technique that Le Guin uses to challenge egoism and conventional knowledge is the crisis. As Zhuangzi’s admonition about “Heaven the Equalizer” indicates, ecological crisis and compensatory reversal are major indications of using overly egoistic “knowledge.” “Heaven the Equalizer” is the same phrase that another translator rendered as “the Lathe of Heaven.”48 In both cases, the English word “heaven” gives it a theistic feel that obscures its essentially ecological significance: systemic relationships are a physical characteristic of any ecosystem, and thoughts and actions find physical limits there. Ecology emerged as an important framework in the ’60s and ’70s in response to the crises of pollution and natural resource depletion. Ecology, like healthy egoism or Dao, is not directly perceptible; only when things go wrong and a crisis arises do most people understand that they have lost the way.
Often Le Guin’s crises focus on psychological or epistemological approaches to problems. In City of Illusions, Falk/Ramarren’s crisis over his identity occurs on the epistemological level, for example, with the Daoist “Old Canon” and the Thoreauvian “New Canon” as his guides. The drought crisis in The Dispossessed serves to compare the de of collective cooperation for survival to the de of dog-eat-dog survival, thereby exploring the concrete borders between essential self-interest and collective cooperation. At other times, however, crisis serves to externalize the enemy in ways similar to satire. In The Telling, efforts to preserve the library at Silong involve combating an enemy that represents several contemporary spheres of power—state, corporation, media propaganda, economics—all combined into a single enemy. Like satire, then, invoking crisis risks implying that egoism is an external enemy, as opposed to confronting the everyday complexity of “normal” egoism.
Along with overt techniques such as satire and crises, Le Guin also challenges egoism and anthropocentric rationality in more subtle ways. One example of systematic challenge to ego is Le Guin’s disciplinary reframing. As numerous critics have pointed out, Le Guin’s protagonists are often anthropologists or ethnologists. As such, they struggle to understand unfamiliar cultures while also finding their own beliefs and assumptions estranged. A large part of the typical “development” of her anthropological characters is therefore unlearning or reframing of fundamental assumptions. Sometimes, as with the Handdara in The Left Hand of Darkness, an exotic belief in unlearning or unreason is described in mystical terms that echo Laozi. At other times—notably in The Dispossessed and The Telling—processes of unlearning are overtly political and realistically explored. In both cases, the substitution of anthropological frames for more familiar historical and political frames serves to model processes of unlearning and subtly emphasizes the transitory nature of human cultures and institutions.
Le Guin’s attention to the “unreasonable” is another characteristic way in which her fictions work toward unlearning conventional knowledge. In Always Coming Home, for example, the Valley people don’t distinguish between subjective time and “real” time. In the section “Time and the City,” the narrator describes how the People of the Valley are baffled by “historical” questions. To Pandora’s questions, the puzzled “Archivist” replies, “You talk all beginnings and ends, spring and ocean but no river.” By comparison, we are told, the Valley “is all middle.”49 This lack of desire to impose rational narratives is contrasted with the hyper-rationalization of the Condor people, who “because [they] said that everything belonged to One [God], they forced themselves to think in twos: either this, or that.” As a result, “They could not be among the Many.”50 Rigid monological or binary structures of thought, Le Guin suggests, are forms of fundamentalist thinking that interfere with properly ecological perception and healthy situation in the lived world.
The Telling also dramatizes healthy forms of unreason. Le Guin has indicated that “what happened to the practice and teaching of Taoism under Mao” served as inspiration for the novel.51 Sutty, the novel’s ethnographic heroine and utopian visitor, studies the Daoist-like traditional culture of Aka, which she labels “an ancient popular cosmology-philosophy-spiritual discipline.”52 She dismisses some of its beliefs and practices as “hocus pocus”—including such things as superstitious sign reading, numerology, bold claims of “supernal powers,” and so forth. Sutty also dismisses “literal readings” or “fundamentalism … reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law.”53 But along with the rational rejection of hocus pocus and fundamentalism, she finds that the humble traditional culture includes genuine and valuable forms of unreason. As one of the storytellers says, “What we do is unreasonable.” The narrator explains, “[she] used that word often, unreasonable, in a literal sense: what cannot be understood by thinking.”54 Compared with this obscure but naturalistic and life-affirming unreason, the ostensibly rational frameworks enforced by the Corporate State are brutal and pathetic and unreasonable in a bad sense: using bad reasoning, literalizing metaphors, creating fundamentalism. Here again, Le Guin’s Daoist ecology produces utopianism that aspires to be a very reasonable form of unreasoning, as a challenge to economic rationalism and the way of the ego.
At its most radical, Le Guin’s challenge to egoism involves challenging the uses of encompassing narratives in general. Most conspicuously, the structure of Always Coming Home demonstrates the refusal of encompassing narrative, undermining rational categories of identity and even the notion of individual human significance. The book has no central human protagonist; the closest thing is Stone Telling, whose story is largely about the transformations of her “identity” in relation to her surroundings and the course of time. The apparent subject of the book is the Valley culture, but the real subject is our process of trying to find a way “into” the Valley mind frame. Le Guin models this process in a very ecological and Daoist way in the chapter titled “Pandora, Worrying about What She Is Doing, Finds a Way into the Valley through the Scrub Oak,” where she meditates on a scrub oak as a living representation of wilderness and on the mind’s illusory desire to explain it. “Look how messy this wilderness is,” Pandora thinks. The scrub oak in front of her “right here now” has “no overall shape,” “isn’t good for anything,” and has “no center and no symmetry.” The leaves seem “to obey some laws,” but only “poorly.” To consider it accurately is to realize that “the civilized mind’s relation to it is imprecise, fortuitous, and full of risk,” because “all the analogies run one direction, our direction.”55 This echoes a famous passage from Zhuangzi about an ugly old tree that endures because it is “useless.”56 Le Guin uses Pandora’s meditation to illustrate both the difficulty of “understanding” the Valley and the illusory egoism of applying fixed rational frameworks to the lived complexity of nature. This is world reduction that forces the reader to feel an ecological framework by stripping away basic narrative and conceptual “analogies.”
Always Coming Home’s experiments with non-narrative epistemology challenge not only the ego’s perspective of an enduring consciousness but also the historian’s sense of what is history and how human existence should be explained. As seen with the scrub oak, “Pandora” as authorial consciousness playfully challenges the conventional view of author as controlling will by confessing what is unknown and unknowable, by reinscribing herself in the text, and by embracing the world as “not accidentally but essentially messy.”57 She frequently stands in for the reader, pursuing our “hobby-horse” of seeking definite outlines of the “history” of the Kesh. Even more than the frameworks of archaeology and anthropology, non-narrative epistemology emphasizes the ephemeral reality of human categories and cultures. Unlike postmodernist challenges to authorship and narrative, however, Pandora’s uncertainty points toward definite material insights about our egoistic uses of narrative and the real ecological processes that our master narratives help us to ignore.
Although The Telling lacks the narrative experimentation of Always Coming Home, it also explores the non-narrative (and ambiguously historical) situation of being all middle, as the title suggests. Again we see world reduction, as Sutty retreats from political complexity throughout the novel; she first flees dystopian fundamentalism on Earth and then the totalitarian industrialization of Dovza City until she arrives at the “backwoods” of Okzat-Ozkat and finally at the library at Silong, a virtual monastery in the mountains. The precious “telling” represented by the library entails a focus on the local, on small stories, on the process of telling stories as the human way to “tell the world,” and on maintaining the enchantment of local life as opposed to the systematic disenchantment enforced by the world state. Sutty struggles to understand the telling and what it represents in rational terms, but discovers (like Pandora) that “a telling is not an explaining.”58
However—unlike Always Coming Home—the novel’s plot and form raise this lesson of “the telling” into a narrative whole: the power of the Ekumen, it is implied, trumps the Akan corporate state and finds a way to preserve the books. Ironically, this preservation of the library at Silong contradicts the impermanence that the worldview of the telling insists upon. The Telling explores the Daoist eco-logic of embracing unreason and avoiding confident narrative explanations, but it also presents a narrative that fantasizes a deus ex machina political victory. Always Coming Home is more radical in both form and content. At the archive maintained by one of the Kesh lodges, even preservation of cultural treasures is subordinated to the recognition of impermanence. As the Archivist explains, they have annual “destruction ceremonies,” because “books are mortal. They die. A book is an act; it takes place in time, not just in space. It is not information, but relation.” This living attitude is contrasted to (but also somewhat supplemented by) the inhuman “City of Mind,” where the machine-logic goal is to keep “a copy of everything.”59 But while The Telling offers its readers narrative compensations that Always Coming Home does not, the utopian goals of the novels are similar: to challenge egoistic perceptions, including comprehensive narratives, in terms of ecological frameworks.
ECOLOGY AS LIMIT
Given the extent of Le Guin’s deployment of yin utopianism, I would argue that Suvin and Jameson were mistaken to consider her Daoism an insignificant framework and to assume that it implies only static balance, ahistorical mysticism, and contemplative passivity. On the contrary, Daoism contributes to the dynamic balance that Suvin admired and to the cognitive effects that both theorists explore in their work on SF and utopia. Rather than being a mistaken framework, Le Guin’s yin utopianism contributes strategically toward goals that are in many ways similar to those of critical theory. Indeed, both critics noted political affinities between their outlooks and Le Guin’s work. Suvin argued that her “political position can be thought of as a radical critic and ally of socialism defending its duty to inherit the heretic democratic [and] civic traditions,” and that her anarchism “can [either] be malevolently thought of as the furthest radical limit at which a disaffected petty-bourgeois intellectual may arrive, a leftist Transcendentalism, or benevolently as a personal, variant name for and way to a truly new libertarian socialism.”60 Jameson acknowledged similar possibilities for reading Le Guin’s work as radical, noting that if it is “the massive commodity environment of late capitalism that has called up this particular literary and imaginative strategy” of world reduction, then it would “amount to a political stance as well.”61 Le Guin’s Daoist ecology contributes as much to these political effects as any other cognitive framework. Within a historical period that dreams of endless growth despite mounting examples of ecological limits, both ecology and Daoism have the potential to provide critical cognitive reframing.
Of course, Suvin and Jameson were correct to think that Le Guin’s ecological frames of reference represent challenges to the conventions and priorities of critical theory. As revealed by their cautious assessments of her work, frameworks that imagine forms of self-limitation are not generally appealing to critical theorists, who understandably associate them with the imposition of bourgeois morality and historical restrictions on freedom. They also regard any visions of materially reduced lifestyles to be ahistorical given the economic realities of industrial modernization and the ever-increasing complexity of late capitalism. Similarly, frameworks that emphasize philosophical changes (such as Le Guin’s strategy of emphasizing eco-logic over ego-logic) strike critical theorists as a nonpolitical focus on thoughts and attitudes, as opposed to collective and material political action. These are important concerns when attempting to assess the real political effects of cultural texts in our ideologically and materially constrained world.
By the same token, however, the reluctance of Suvin and Jameson to consider Le Guin’s ecological framework highlights how critical theory subtly relies on the industrial vision of endless growth. Ideologically, critical theory finds it hard to reconcile its view of freedom with any real limitations on individual desire or action, even while celebrating Le Guin’s “radical disbelief in the individualist ideology.”62 Suvin himself suggested that the non-Marxist traditions that she draws on might provide a “precious antidote to socialism’s contamination by the same alienating forces it has been fighting so bitterly in the last century—by power apparatuses and a pragmatic rationality that become ends instead of means.” By comparison to critical theory’s ideal of endless revolution, Le Guin’s Daoist ecology asserts that real limits exist, that knowing those enduring limits and relationships is wisdom, and that “ruin and disorder” result from forgetting or ignoring the limits. Reading Le Guin’s ecological concerns and world reduction primarily as symptomatic reaction ignores the real limits that the ecological framework raises.
Le Guin’s characteristically optimistic narratives don’t presume that wholeness and balance will occur, or examine how systemic world reduction would occur, but they do envision characters and cultures where the wisdom of “knowing what endures” can be practiced and tested. This yin utopianism combines the cognitive and material critique of critical theory with a radical form of world reduction that attempts to envision healthy limits on egoism. In both its cognitive and material aspects, her yin utopianism attempts to return us to the root. Challenging egoism is undoubtedly a utopian goal, given the psychosocial ecosystem of global consumer capitalism. But in a very real sense, the way of the ego is not the real ecosystem, and not what endures.
Notes
1. The phrase “wholeness and balance” comes from Douglas Barbour, “Wholeness and Balance in the Hainish Novels of Ursula K. Le Guin,” Science Fiction Studies 1 (1974): 164–73. The seventh issue of SFS (vol. 2, no. 3, November 1975) was devoted entirely to Le Guin’s work. In addition to Barbour’s “Wholeness and Balance: An Addendum” (248–49), essays in this special issue that referenced themes of balance included Donald F. Theall, “The Art of Social-Science Fiction: The Ambiguous Utopian Dialectics of Ursula K. Le Guin,” 256–64; Ian Watson, “The Forest as Metaphor for Mind: ‘The Word for World Is Forest’ and ‘Vaster Than Empires and More Slow,’” 231–37; and David L. Porter, “The Politics of Le Guin’s Opus,” 243–48.
2. The phrase “non-capitalist habitat” is from Darko Suvin, “Parables of De-Alienation: Le Guin’s Widdershins Dance,” 136. The essay was first published in Science Fiction Studies 2, no. 3 (November 1975): 265–74, and republished (among other places) in Suvin, Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1988), 134–50. My citations refer to the latter.
3. The term “mythopoetic” was widely applied to Le Guin’s work; see for example Rafail Nudelman, “An Approach to the Structure of Le Guin’s SF,” trans. Alan G. Myers, Science Fiction Studies 2 (1975): 210–20.
4. I use the pinyin system of transliterating Chinese, which has become the international standard. Le Guin and most previous critics of her Daoism use the older Wade-Giles system, which transliterates the word as “Taoism.” For details of the two see http://pinyin.info/index.html. To facilitate continuity with earlier scholarship, I provide the Wade-Giles equivalent in parentheses for terms that are different in pinyin.
5. Stillman, “The Dispossessed as Ecological Political Theory,” in The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed,” ed. Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), 55.
6. Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? (London: Zed Books, 2007), 233.
7. Ibid., 234.
8. Ibid., 233.
9. Ibid., 230.
10. Examples of prominent critical theorists whose work on Le Guin follows in the path of Suvin and Jameson would include Tom Moylan and Carl Freedman. China Miéville overtly questions Suvin’s assumptions in “Cognition as Ideology: A Dialectic of SF Theory,” his afterword to Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction, ed. Mark Bould and China Miéville (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), 231–48.
11. Le Guin and Suvin have given conflicting accounts of Suvin’s involvement with and influence on The Dispossessed. Le Guin says that Suvin was the novel’s “first reader and first critic” and influenced the ending of the book; see for example “A Response, by Ansible, from Tau Ceti,” in Davis and Stillman, New Utopian Politics, 308. Suvin denies any major involvement; see “Cognition, Freedom, The Dispossessed as a Classic,” in Defined by a Hollow: Essays on Utopia, Science Fiction and Political Epistemology (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 513n.
12. Science Fiction Studies 2, no. 3 (November 1975).
13. Suvin, Positions and Presuppositions, 134.
14. Ibid., 135.
15. Ibid., 136.
16. Ibid., 143.
17. Ibid., 149.
18. Ibid., 138.
19. Ibid., 145. Porter’s essay, in the same issue, made a similar point about Daoism as a temporary phase of Le Guin’s work.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., 138.
22. Darko Suvin, “Afterword: With Sober, Estranged Eyes,” in Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition, and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia, ed. Patrick Parrinder (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 239.
23. See Part 1, “The Desire Called Utopia,” in Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 1–233.
24. Science Fiction Studies 2, no. 3 (November 1975): 221–30. Jameson’s essay was subsequently reprinted as “World Reduction in Le Guin: The Emergence of Utopian Narrative,” in Ursula K. Le Guin: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 57–70, and with its original title in Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future, 267–80. My references are to the latter.
25. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 271.
26. Ibid., 269.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 275. For example, Jameson notes the “Tao-like passivity” (275) of George Orr in The Lathe of Heaven—a reading he developed at length in “Progress versus Utopia, or, Can We Imagine the Future?” published in 1982 and republished in Archaeologies of the Future, 281–95.
29. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 90.
30. Ibid., 88, 90.
31. Le Guin, “A Response to the Le Guin Issue,” Science Fiction Studies 3, no. 1 (March 1976): 43–46.
32. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World, 90. Le Guin notes that the quoted passage is from bk. 2, chap. 38 of the Daodejing.
33. Le Guin had long been experimenting with her own translations of the Daodejing; see her introduction and “Notes” to her Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way (Boston: Shambhala, 1998).
34. Le Guin, Lao Tzu, 22.
35. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World, 93.
36. Ibid., 85.
37. André Gorz, Ecology as Politics, trans. Patsy Vigderman and Jonathan Cloud (Boston: South End Press, 1980), 16.
38. Ibid., 13.
39. Ibid., 16.
40. Of course, this strategy is far from infallible. Gorz notes that “ecology, as a purely scientific discipline, does not necessarily imply the rejection of authoritarian, technofascist solutions” (17), and even the desire to break from capitalism and the way of the ego can itself be easily commodified and rendered impotent. Ultimately, however, “ecological concerns are fundamental; they cannot be compromised or postponed” (20).
41. Le Guin, Lao Tzu, 110–11.
42. Ibid., 12.
43. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World, 92–93.
44. Ibid., 90.
45. For Le Guin’s account of this translation decision see Le Guin, Lao Tzu, 110. On the philosophical implications of translating de (te), see Alan Watts, “Te—Virtuality,” in Tao: The Watercourse Way (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 106–22.
46. Quoted in Amy M. Clarke, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Journey to Post-Feminism (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 124.
47. Suvin, Positions and Presuppositions, 137.
48. For Le Guin’s account of this see her Dancing at the Edge of the World, 93n, and Lao Tzu, 108.
49. Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 163.
50. Ibid., 352–53.
51. Quoted in Susan M. Bernardo and Graham J. Murphy, Ursula K. Le Guin: A Critical Companion (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006), 83.
52. Le Guin, The Telling (New York: Harcourt, 2000), 131.
53. Ibid., 132.
54. Ibid., 141.
55. Le Guin, Always Coming Home, 239–41.
56. For one version of the story see The Book of Chuang Tzu, trans. Martin Palmer with Elizabeth Breuilly (London: Arkana, 1996), 6.
57. Le Guin, Always Coming Home, 240.
58. Le Guin, Telling, 139. The “umyazu” or libraries are described on 128–29.
59. Le Guin, Always Coming Home, 314–15.
60. Suvin, Positions and Presuppositions, 147.
61. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 278.
62. Suvin, Positions and Presuppositions, 148.